Anglo-American political science is dominated by the image of rational man. Politics is the maximising of something or other: material benefits for the voter, votes for the politician....
The ‘trade-union problem’ has dominated British politics for the last two decades. It has been the downfall of three governments – Wilson’s in 1970, Heath’s in 1974...
The Civil Service attracts so much foolish, ignorant and malicious criticism that the unprejudiced observer is apt to assume, on the principle that mine enemy’s enemy is my friend, that...
No one could read Sir Denis Barnes’s book, Governments and Trade Unions,* without a sense of deep depression. He himself foresees that a ‘continuation of the existing relationship...
The eight-year regime of Idi Amin in Uganda will go down in history as one of the 20th-century’s horrors that could have been prevented. From Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany,...
In reviewing one of these books, I must ‘declare an interest’. Paul Johnson’s is a volume in the Mainstream Series of which I am an editor, although I have had no connection...
What have Margaret Thatcher and David Steel in common, apart from holding the leadership of their respective political parties? Both are highly intelligent and educated persons with academic...
The value and interest of the three examinations of Gramsci which I began to discuss last week in the first part of this article is that they concentrate upon his view of politics: nobody...
When the Redcoats first encountered the Colonial revolutionaries they were quite unexpectedly beaten, and according to an anecdote in Harold Rosenberg’s The Tradition of the New, they were...
The Englishness of English historians lies in their eclecticism. Few would admit to being unswerving Marxists, Freudians, Structuralists, Cliometricians, Namierites, or even Whigs. Most believe...
This is a dictionary of a language that does not yet quite exist. If this seems a paradoxical way to talk of standard modern Chinese, the paradox is easily enough resolved by a brief account of...
For more than a generation, what Europeans call social democracy and what Americans call liberalism has been the dominant political creed of the North Atlantic world. Its achievements have been...
As a child he was almost always alone. A tiny coffin and shroud stood in the house in Sardinia until he was 23, mute and awesome memorials to the time he almost bled to death, at the age of four....
Not since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 have people in the West been so fearful of the possibility of nuclear war. Ironically enough, this is at a time when the chances of a massive nuclear...
Must social policy be boring? After all, economic policy still keeps people awake while the phoney war between neo-Keynesians and monetarists lasts. Political policy (sit venia verba) continues...
Elitists are a cheerless class and Vilfredo Pareto was no exception. He certainly led a cheerless life. He gave up a career as an engineer for writing and politics, but although he succeeded...
Anthony Summers’s argument is remarkably simple. There is a tape-recording of the gunfire which killed President Kennedy. The third and fourth shots are too close together to have come from...
Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the former Shah of Iran, haunts the international stage like a latter-day Lear. In the loneliness of his exile he is bitter about his former allies and still incredulous at...